Collaboration with Language; not always possible

It's simply a matter of economics. All of the software vendors that I have worked with (quite a few, in fact) have all complained about the time, effort, and cost of "localizing" products. In most cases, the foreign language versions lag the product release by months. Why do they do it? Because it's economically worth it. They only release languages where they know that they will get a return on their investment. With free trials, however, it's hard enough to recoup your costs anyway, much less to recoup localization costs for the software, the intro presentations, the tutorials, and so on.. I hate to speak for the vendors, but as a former business owner, I can't say that I would spend the time and money either.

Alan(Unregistered)11/09/05 07:30 AM

You Should Pursue This

Yes you should pursue this. It is a major issue and a current topic of conversation. Major users of major PLM software are standardising on English (no bad thing perhaps...) because whilst the software may well have localised langauge versions, the data is not localised. To store it separately brings lifecycle issues to the verification & validation of the data, as well as adding complexity to the database and to do it on demand not only would have the same issues as before, but as you have found, on-line translators are not reliable even for common language, much less engineering terminology and company standard abreviations (just for example). This was a hot topic amongst delegates at a European PLM summit conference in London earlier this year, sponsored by AMR research.

Ken(Unregistered)11/30/05 10:47 PM

Language Aficionado

First, I assume you meant to link to http://www.babelfish.com? Got to get that Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy stuff spelled right, you know. This thing of crossing language barriers is a whole lot broader than the CAD business, obviously. Online translators are a start, although the results are sometimes barely intelligible in the translated version. Worse, since they primarily take a word for word approach, there is a very real possibility of miscommunication. Language isn't that easy, or the translation tools wouldn't be stuck in such a primitive form as we see them today. Even if we could get past such problems as word order, syntactical arrangement, and which of the various possible meanings to assign to a word in a particular context, we would still have to deal with the idiomatic expressions that are all but impossible to deal with at today's level of translation software. But the topic is a good one, and worthy of further discussion.